Time out on reforms

Published: Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 08:00 AM.

Teachers’ unions complaining about education reforms and accountability measures is one of those “dog bites man” stories that often go through one ear and out the other. The prospect of self-interest and partisan political leanings trumping rational evaluation precludes many from taking such criticisms seriously — even if they are indeed warranted.

When Don Gaetz and the critics are singing in tune, though, it’s time to take a closer look at that hymnal.

The Florida Senate president (who represents Bay County) this week said the state’s new teacher evaluation system isn’t working, and lawmakers should stop making major changes in public schools until that plan and other key initiatives are fixed and implemented.

The state in December released preliminary ratings of Florida’s 130,000 public school teachers using a new evaluation system. They showed 96.5 percent rated as being “effective” or better — a unrealistically high number that should make everyone suspicious of the process, especially in light of the fact that school grades from earlier in the year showed that 27 percent of elementary, 36 percent of middle and 21 percent of the state’s high schools were given a letter grade of C or lower.

The new system is part of the education reforms passed in 2011. Beginning in 2014, the evaluations will determine teacher salaries and their contract statuses. Educators say the evaluations are unfair because the student-performance portion requires at least two years of FCAT data, even though not every subject or grade takes that test. Instructors not covered by the FCAT may instead be judged on their school’s overall performance. Over the next two years, districts will be adding more classroom assessments to try to better measure these teachers.

Anything with that big an impact must have the confidence of most everyone involved that it is accurate and being implemented fairly. Many educators warned about the evaluation methods even before the fishy numbers came out, and just because the grades made their profession look like it was doing a bang-up job didn’t dissuade them from maintaining the criticism.

Having Gaetz — who’s hardly a squish on education reform — on board should persuade the rest of Capitol to take a giant step back and re-evaluate. Not only did the Niceville Republican express well-deserved skepticism of the teacher evaluations, he noted that Florida is phasing in national Common Core State Standards, a new test for assessing student performance. He called these changes are “all like rockets that have been shot in the air.”

Teachers’ unions complaining about education reforms and accountability measures is one of those “dog bites man” stories that often go through one ear and out the other. The prospect of self-interest and partisan political leanings trumping rational evaluation precludes many from taking such criticisms seriously — even if they are indeed warranted.

When Don Gaetz and the critics are singing in tune, though, it’s time to take a closer look at that hymnal.

The Florida Senate president (who represents Bay County) this week said the state’s new teacher evaluation system isn’t working, and lawmakers should stop making major changes in public schools until that plan and other key initiatives are fixed and implemented.

The state in December released preliminary ratings of Florida’s 130,000 public school teachers using a new evaluation system. They showed 96.5 percent rated as being “effective” or better — a unrealistically high number that should make everyone suspicious of the process, especially in light of the fact that school grades from earlier in the year showed that 27 percent of elementary, 36 percent of middle and 21 percent of the state’s high schools were given a letter grade of C or lower.

The new system is part of the education reforms passed in 2011. Beginning in 2014, the evaluations will determine teacher salaries and their contract statuses. Educators say the evaluations are unfair because the student-performance portion requires at least two years of FCAT data, even though not every subject or grade takes that test. Instructors not covered by the FCAT may instead be judged on their school’s overall performance. Over the next two years, districts will be adding more classroom assessments to try to better measure these teachers.

Anything with that big an impact must have the confidence of most everyone involved that it is accurate and being implemented fairly. Many educators warned about the evaluation methods even before the fishy numbers came out, and just because the grades made their profession look like it was doing a bang-up job didn’t dissuade them from maintaining the criticism.

Having Gaetz — who’s hardly a squish on education reform — on board should persuade the rest of Capitol to take a giant step back and re-evaluate.
Not only did the Niceville Republican express well-deserved skepticism of the teacher evaluations, he noted that Florida is phasing in national Common Core State Standards, a new test for assessing student performance. He called these changes are “all like rockets that have been shot in the air.”

“We need to quit shooting rockets into the air,” Gaetz said. “We need to give schools and school districts, teachers and parents time to institutionalize the reforms that have already been made. We need about a two-year cooling off period.”

In similar remarks he made to the Florida Current last week, Gaetz said “there’s a danger of all this imploding and causing a real credibility problem for the Department of Education.”

It will be interesting to see how Gaetz’s departure from hard-charging Republican education reform — which is still heavily influenced by former Gov. Jeb Bush and his foundations — shakes out politically. But the Senate leader is correct to want to take time to ensure that anything Florida does is done right.

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